Your tech questions answered

What's the best way to back-up your precious music and pictures? How to manage all those passwords? And where to put pre-loaded, unwanted apps? Just some of the issues readers have for our expert this month

Q. I have a large collection of music and video on my hard drive but don't back up. Backing up to the cloud would be expensive (and who knows how long those services may last) and backing up to an external hard drive that would most likely get stolen along with my laptop seems pretty pointless. What other solutions are there?Ian, Islington, London

A. No strategy is completely foolproof – and I understand your concerns about back-ups and cloud solutions. The best way to think of each back-up you use is as an extra failsafe. However, some of the best include: Transporter, Backblaze and Crashplan.

Transporter is a network drive that backs up your data and has no monthly fees once you've purchased the device. It replicates the data across transporters you've authorised, so you can keep one in the office and at home, or at a friend/family member's house, and have offsite data replication.

Backblaze is a cloud back-up solution from Rackspace – an industry standard for high performance and reliable servers – and it replicates all of your data across multiple data centres with high security and reliability.

It allows you to back up multiple computers and even your external drives. You also get unlimited storage and it's less than you might expect – $5/£3 a month or $50/£30 a year, and in the unfortunate situation that you need to restore your data, you can either download it or get them to send you a hard drive with all your data on it.

Crashplan is a cross between Backblaze and Transporter, it automatically backs up to multiple data centres, as well as being able to back up to other drives and friends'/families'/spare computers around the world and intelligently pausing uploads if you are running high intensity programs that leave few resources and when on low battery.

Q. Can you give me an effective and secure password strategy?Jane, Wolverhampton

A. Passwords are an important part of our digital lives, and as such, there are many solutions to securing your online identity.

Not all of them will work for you, especially when you need to find solutions that work across the number of platforms we find ourselves exposed to on a daily basis, either mobile, tablet or desktops.

Fortunately there are solutions that work across most platforms, the most popular of which is 1Password by AgileBits.

It has clients for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android, and syncs through DropBox or over a local WiFi network, meaning that the data is not tied into any one storage service, and you can back up the passwords file.

Alternatively there is LastPass, a cloud-based option, however, you cannot manually back up this data, and will require an internet connection to access it.

Q. As a parent I worry about how I can ensure that my 10-year-old is protected online. Which social media site should she be using? What safeguards and filters can I employ? How can I be sure she's not being bullied or engaging with predators?Michael, Oswestry

A. Child safety on the internet is a big issue, as we must protect them from things such as pornography and trolling, without restricting access to genuinely useful information. The old method of simply keeping an eye on the child while they are using a computer is much harder now we have constant access via laptops, tablets and other devices. To cover this, you need to use something like OpenDNS, which allows flexible controls such as custom block pages and can even protect their mobiles.

As for social media, it is against the terms of service for those under 13 to use them. However, if you do still choose to allow your children access, you should set up all the privacy settings, and set firm rules about who they add as friends, and add yourself as a friend to see what is being posted. You could also set up a monthly review, whereby you sit with them and talk about things like cyber-bullying, or what has happened that month. If anything has, you can report it to either your child's school, or if you expect grooming or similar – report it to the police.

Q. How can I strip useless pre-loaded apps from my HTC phone?Nicola, south London

A. The non-standard, carrier- or provider-installed apps on your phone (bloatware) waste space on your device, and often run on startup, wasting system resources and battery life. Fortunately you can deal with this quite easily. If you just wish to disable the app (hiding it from your AppDrawer and preventing it from ever launching) and are running Android 4.0 or newer (most devices released in the last year come with it as standard), you can simply launch settings, swipe over into "Apps", tap the app you want to disable, then tap "disable" on the next screen. Doing this leaves the files on your device, wasting storage space, but they can be difficult to remove fully without some technical know-how or a tutorial, as it requires you to either "root" your device, or install a custom version of Android. Rooting is easier but the process is different on most devices – a wide collection of guides can be found on AndroidRooting and MoDaCo's forum . When you have rooted you can install "titanium backup" and forcibly remove the software.

Q. How do I prolong the life of my smartphone battery?Miranda, Southampton

A. Gone are the days when you needed to charge your phone once a week, with smartphone batteries often lasting less than a day, although you can double battery life by following a few simple steps:

Disable WiFi when not connected to a network as it constantly looks for networks to connect to, using lots of energy.

Turn on auto-brightness to prevent the backlight from using more energy than necessary.

If you're on Android, then applications that you may have closed using your home button may still be running in the background using system resources and energy – you can force quit them using "ATK" or another task manager from the play store.

Q. How can I guard against hacking emails? Rhys, Swansea

A. You can guard against "hacking" emails with a variety of means, firstly by introducing spam filters on either your email client or web app (like google mail), to block key phrases and blacklist domains that have previously sent spam. You can also be careful to only download/open attachments and click links from people you know, and make sure that the email appears to be written by them, as they may have malware that sends malicious emails appearing to originate from them. If on Windows you should also do regular scans using your antivirus software and the free version of Malwarebytes.

Daniel is a freelance programmer for iOS and web. He is a student and has been coding for various things since the age of eight. He is an ambassador for Young Rewire State. and can be found on Twitter @DanToml.